I would argue Baltimore is not a statistical outlier, but rather a predictable precursor – a canary in the coalmine if you will that indicates what American cities will increasingly degenerate towards going forward if our nation does not significantly reform how we handle them. Cities in Post-Modern Amerika suffer from an interlocking directory of failure modes which retard their economic and social development. This scares many productive and worthwhile people out of setting foot on one of their streets unless necessity brooks no other course of action. A typical American City will usually be worse than the surrounding countryside in crime, illegitimacy, educational outcomes, and economic opportunity. This is precisely opposite of how it was originally intended to work.

To make American Secondary Schools worth a monkey’s butt-wipe again, we are just going to have to leave some children behind. Right now, they are yet another precursor of the impending Big Government Chernobyl that could very well destroy American Society as we now enjoy living in it. Implementing a new Common Core of unenforceable and utterly ignored standards is not going to fix this difficulty. While the Obama Administration’s ideal of “fewer, higher and clearer” standards sounds like one of the smarter ideas that this man’s administration has come up with, it will not do the job because it addresses the wrong problem. It is not the content of the standards that is the biggest problem with our schools. The problem is that we lack the institutional courage to actually enforce any standards at all.

What American Secondary Schools need to enact is what I’ll call the Tyler Durden reforms. This is based on the line from the novel Fight Club where Tyler Durden teaches his followers that they are not unique and beautiful snowflakes. If we continue to tell our children that they are special and immune from consequence, they will eventually become seduced into holding that ultimately self-defeating belief. This fatal conceit will lead these children to have an overweening sense of entitlement and a minimal skill-set of abilities that any logical employer would want to hire.

Don’t get me wrong. I like O-Care about as much as I like getting a prostate exam. The bill is typical of unthinking, boilerplate socialism’s response to the negative externalities that result from market failure. We should therefore trash Obamacare, but let’s just make that the warm-up set. The real heavy lifting required to fix our healthcare system involves addressing the causes of a market failure so catastrophic that something as obviously stupid as Obamacare seemed like a palatable solution.

Karl Denninger explains why poor people often can’t afford health insurance. The care provided is so badly overpriced that health plans are paying out more vastly more than the goods and services provided can possibly be worth. He describes the price mark-up of a common chemotherapy drug below.

…and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Critique of the Gotha Program – Karl Marx

It was 1875, and Germany was well on its way to breaking Marx’s wretched little heart by enacting just enough social welfare to pacify its proletariat and preventing idiots like Karl from making any important decisions. Marx wrote the on the Gotha Program in an effort to prevent his revolutionary ideas from becoming more co-opted than the DNC-sponsored anti-Iraq War Movement of 2006. He failed, but his motto remains the standard Twitterplate description of what Marxism is ultimately supposed to accomplish.

What Marx attempted to establish was thoroughly unworkable in a static or shrinking economy. That, in a sense was a saving grace. It had its own limiting factor, you ran out of other people’s money. What the United States has achieved through entitlements is worse.

…and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Critique of the Gotha Program – Karl Marx

It was 1875, and Germany was well on its way to breaking Marx’s wretched little heart by enacting just enough social welfare to pacify its proletariat and preventing idiots like Karl from making any important decisions. Marx wrote the on the Gotha Program in an effort to prevent his revolutionary ideas from becoming more co-opted than the DNC-sponsored anti-Iraq War Movement of 2006. He failed, but his motto remains the standard Twitterplate description of what Marxism is ultimately supposed to accomplish.

What Marx attempted to establish was thoroughly unworkable in a static or shrinking economy. That, in a sense was a saving grace. It had its own limiting factor, you ran out of other people’s money. What the United States has achieved through entitlements is worse.

Sometimes the first step in building a thing of beauty is to dynamite the ugly, dying strip mall that occupies the real estate you want to build upon. We, the American Conservative Movement can rebuild once the junk gets cleared away. We just have to be ready, and we just have to avoid bailing the Progressives out of their own state-fueled death spiral of non-sustainability.

Currently, our society is chasing its own tail into the abyss. The books give us certain rules and facts, and we follow those; when that doesn’t work out, we redouble our efforts using the same rules and facts. Like robots, we cannot deviate from our programming because we’ve eliminated the people who can think outside the box.